Law & Society Blog

Michael Glennon, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the constitutional war powers, highlights the need for Congressional re-authorization of any US military effort in Iraq in this Washington Post op-ed.
Congress in 2002 authorized imperfect war in approving the use of force in Iraq for specific, limited objectives. As those objectives are achieved, or different […]

Socrates was offside!

(HT: Brian Leiter)
Technorati Tags: philosophy, soccer

After an eye-opening trip to Toronto earlier this year, we’re now exploring Montreal, another truly great city.

It seems that we can’t get enough of this timeless problem.

Here is an inspired cartoon by the Australian artist Bill Leak.

Privacy International published an interesting survey of the degree of informational privacy afforded by various countries to its citizens.

Because liberals respect competing values, such as procedural fairness and individual dignity, they weigh more carefully particular exercises of government power (such as the use of secret evidence, hearsay and torture), but they are no less willing to use government authority in other forms (such as expanded police forces and international diplomacy) to protect the nation and its citizens.10…. It is liberals who have demanded and continue to demand legal protections to avoid the conviction of innocent people in the criminal justice system, reasonable restraints on government surveillance of American citizens, and fair procedures to ensure that alleged enemy combatants are in fact enemy combatants.

In “Letter to a Christian Nation,” Sam Harris refers to a Gallup polls according to which[f]orty four percent of the American population is convinced that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. (p.

Geoff Manne at Truth on the Market offers the following insightful comment, extending a discussion about the proportionality of Skilling’s sentence compared to sentences meted out in the so-called “war on drugs.”The problem in the drug war context is quite different, at least for me…. The question there, however, is how to do so optimally, given the staggering social costs of over-deterrence; the risk of self-aggrandizing, politically-motivated, error-prone prosecution; and the reality of pretty good, existing agency-cost controls.

Access to the internet makes pornography more readily available—not only cheaper and easier to find, but more private and so less likely to lead to embarrassment and other negative social consequences…. There was no similar relation for murder, which suggests that the result is not simply picking up the effect of some third variable that correlates with both internet access and violent crime.